Co-Op Digital Advertising Strategies

The digital advertising landscape may seem more challenging than ever. A global pandemic has accelerated the push for businesses to adapt to an online model; many of which have thrived as a result. This is a time to adapt conventional marketing methods and capitalize on opportunities to enhance your online presence—it’s past time to catch-up, now we need to innovate.

While cooperative advertising has long been popular with traditional media, this is the moment to incorporate it into your digital strategy. Marketers should be considering investing their dollars in digital if they want to stay relevant in the new normal. Whether you're a brand or a retailer, read on to learn how a digital co-op strategy can blow past business KPIs in 2021.

What is Digital Co-Op Advertising?

Back to the basics: co-op advertising happens between companies selling multiple brands who share the costs for advertising.

You may be most familiar with traditional co-op advertising appearing in Sunday newspaper mailers. Popular big-box retailers work in tandem with represented brands to build the placements and visibility of products. Digital co-op advertising works similarly: brands can partially or fully fund retailer ads to increase the reach of their brand or product.

Leverage as Much Data as Possible

The ever-changing digital ecosystem has marketers more pressured than ever to scale, a difficult task when faced with the recurring changes to audience targeting, especially data regulation.

A key point to take into consideration is the release of iOS 14. Knowing that Apple stated that in order to track users across apps or websites—or to access the device’s advertising identifier—user permission will be required, it’s important to be prepared for data loss. With this roll-out there’s going to be fewer web signals and limited access to third-party data.

With digital co-op advertising, brands can leverage the first-party data of large retail companies to reach a highly qualified audience without losing targeting precision. Moreover, access to this data accomplishes what Lookalike and Competitor targeting has always aimed to do. For retailers, partnering with others in a program of this kind will allow them to monetize their first-party data.

Consider the Advantages

With audiences growing and engaging online more than ever, thinking of ways to reach them and connect offline experiences to digital is certainly something your strategy should be covering. The exposure people are having to online sales has been increasing since September 2019. Only in the U.S., the number of exclusive online shoppers grew by 133% over a one-year period. Especially for brands with relationships to brick-and-mortar retailers, in-store first-party data could be the next gold mine audience segment.

A digital co-op strategy can grant some benefits worth considering:

• Enhanced Measurement: If you’ve only experienced traditional co-op advertising, bringing your strategy online makes it easier to gather and analyze performance data. Especially in the age of proving every media dollar can go farther, measurement is critical to proving media effectiveness and identifying optimization opportunities.
• Granular Targeting: By taking a granular approach to audience targeting, you have the opportunity to ensure that you are communicating with the right person at the right time with the right message.
• High Value Digital Experiences: Offering differentiated experiences is more effective and cost-efficient with digital media than traditional. Users are expecting to be delivered highly relevant and impactful content, so digital co-op campaigns allow for the opportunity to deliver custom messaging for key audience segments.

Rise has extensive retail and brand experience. Connect with us and let our team provide personalized solutions for you with effective strategies to reach more customers.